Classical

It was a frigid day in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2009, when classical music, literally, took centre stage at the inauguration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. As part of the festivities, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, and pianist Gabriela Montero performed the debut of Air and Simple Gifts, composed for the event by John Williams. The performance went off without a hitch—not surprisingly, given that it had actually been prerecorded and was mimed by the illustrious musicians.

When the deception was revealed days later, a controversy began to stir. The media made references to Milli Vanilli, the infamous lip-syncing pop duo. The furor subsided quickly, however, when it was reported that the cold had prevented a “live” performance because of the effect low temperatures have on musical instruments. In fact, Ma and Perlman had put soap on their bows to dull the sound of their instruments so as not to intrude on the recording, which had been made the previous Sunday at a Marine barracks in Washington. (The piece was subsequently given its concert debut January 23 by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.) It was that sort of year in classical music, when the controversies surrounding the music tended at times to obscure the music itself.

Earlier in January, Argentine-born Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim canceled performances in Doha, Qatar, and in Cairo because of security concerns related to the ongoing fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas. The concerts were part of the 10th anniversary tour of Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was composed of young musicians from Israel, Palestine, and Arab countries.

In March a West Bank children’s orchestra, the Strings of Freedom, was shuttered by local residents after it performed a concert for Holocaust survivors in Israel. An official of the Jenin refugee camp accused the orchestra’s leader of having exploited the children for political purposes in what was billed as a Good Deeds Day event organized by an Israeli billionaire.

Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman created a stir of his own when in April he announced during a performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, that because of his objection to U.S. foreign policy, he would no longer perform in the United States. “Get your hands off my country,” he told stunned concertgoers.

During the summer the New York Philharmonic made political waves when it announced that it was considering performing in Havana. When continuing U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba ultimately forced the concerts to be canceled, the Cuban government proclaimed its outrage and blamed the fracas on the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, two opera stars who had previously announced their retirement changed their minds. In May, Spanish tenor José Carreras, 62, announced that “my [opera] career is done.” In August, New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, 65, said that her opera career was coming to an end as well. While neither singer had ruled out future recital appearances, they both subsequently withdrew any plans to quit the world of opera. Meanwhile, Plácido Domingo, 68—no longer able to hit the high notes that made him one of the most illustrious tenors of his generation—drew a standing ovation when in October he made his debut appearance in a baritone role in a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at the Staatsoper in Berlin.

Oddly, given its role as a perennial source of familial (soap) opera, the 2009 edition of Germany’s Bayreuth Festival opened with a children’s version of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Children were even encouraged to participate in the newly conceived truncated version of the opera, which was the brainchild of new festival co-directors, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. The half sisters, both great-granddaughters of the composer, took over the reins of the annual Wagner festival from their father, Wolfgang, who had ruled the festival roost for more than half a century. Katharina Wagner told the press that “it is a matter of the heart for me to bring opera to the people.” As part of that effort, the new directors also announced a deal with London’s Royal Opera House’s Opus Arte production company to release the festival’s productions on DVD, and on August 9 they offered the festival’s performance of Tristan und Isolde live on the Internet.

As it had often in recent years, the world of classical music continued to embrace the Internet as a way of extending its outreach and influence. In June the New York Philharmonic announced that it was creating an online archive of concert data reaching back to its first performance on Dec. 7, 1842. The service offered online users the ability to search its database by composer, artist, and individual concert programs.

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra pursued a more commercial course with its online “digital concert hall,” in which performances were made available either live or via reruns on the Internet. The fee for a single concert was €9.90, and the cost of a season ticket was €149 (1€ = about $1.40). Sir Simon Rattle kicked off the online offerings in January with a performance of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1.

In July, Classical TV, an online streaming video service, was launched, offering both free and pay-per-view opera, ballet, and theatre performances. In addition to more than a dozen productions from New York’s Metropolitan Opera (the Met), Classical TV also presented broadcasts by the English National Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Zürich Opera, and others. The price of an online viewing was $4.99 or $9.99 per performance.

Twitter, the online social network phenomenon, was the star of the show in September at London’s Royal Opera House. The company presented The Twitter Opera, with music by composer Helen Porter and a libretto made up of the site’s signature short messages submitted by the public via the ROH’s @youropera Twitter feed. Twitter was also the focus of a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra in July. During the orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, concertgoers could follow the music with 50 “tweets” about the score that were sent to their Web-enabled mobile devices from the conductor, who had prewritten such tweetful insights as “In my score Beethoven has printed Nightingale=flute Quail=oboe Cuckoo=clarinet—a mini concerto for woodwind/birds.” (See alsoSidebar.)

Not to be outdone, another Internet site entered the action when on April 15 the YouTube Symphony Orchestra made its debut at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. The orchestra was made up of 93 musicians who had been selected from some 3,000 audition videos that had been submitted to the Web site from more than 70 countries. Fifteen million online visitors voted on the winners, who were led in the debut performance by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The U.K.’s Gramophone magazine hailed the orchestra “for democratising classical music on a global scale, making it truly all-inclusive.”

Even as the classical world embraced the future, it was confronted by the disturbing economic realities of the present. While the nonprofit group Americans for the Arts estimated that the ongoing recession in 2009 would force as many as 10,000 arts organizations out of business, classical orchestras and opera and ballet companies tried to weather the economic storm. Both the Met and the Los Angeles Opera cut productions from their seasons and cut salaries; the Los Angeles Opera laid off 17 people in the process. The Connecticut Opera closed after 67 seasons, as did the Opera Pacific, Santa Ana, Calif., and the Baltimore (Md.) Opera declared bankruptcy. Budgetary problems caused the San Francisco Opera to cancel a production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and a revival of Puccini’s La Bohème.

Financial difficulties were not confined to the U.S. Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre was forced to cancel a tour of Mexico and the premiere of its new production of Verdi’s Otello.Italy’s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino called off productions of Verdi’s Macbeth and Britten’s Billy Budd that were to have been featured at the Florence festival. South Korea particularly felt the impact when tours to that country by the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony, and the Cincinnati (Ohio) Symphony were called off for reasons of belt-tightening.

After a career that spanned 45 years, the legendary Guarneri String Quartet called it quits in 2009. Three of the group’s members had founded the ensemble at Vermont’s Marlboro Music Festival in 1963 and were in their 70s.

As some books were closed, new chapters for others were opened. In an October program at the Hollywood Bowl, entitled “Bienvenido Gustavo,” 28-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel made his debut as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In June Lorin Maazel led his last performance as music director of the New York Philharmonic with a concert at Avery Fisher Hall before being succeeded in the post in September by Alan Gilbert. In October Rattle reaffirmed his commitment to the Berlin Philharmonic when he signed a contract to continue as the orchestra’s artistic director through 2018.

Throughout the year orchestras in the U.S. and Europe marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of composer Felix Mendelssohn with performances of his works. In one of the most notable events, 13 of the German composer’s long-lost works were performed in January at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. Two previously unknown works by Mozart were heard for the first time in August when the International Mozarteum Foundation, based in Salzburg, Austria, unveiled them in a performance by pianist Florian Birsak, who played the pieces on the composer’s own fortepiano. In October the sound of Frederick the Great’s flute was heard for the first time in more than 200 years when the instrument was played at the Usedom Music Festival on the eponymous Baltic island.

An opera by popular singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright debuted in July at the Manchester (Eng.) International Festival. The work, Prima Donna, was originally commissioned by the Met, but the company withdrew when Wainwright decided to write the libretto in French. Canadian playwright-director John Murrell’s English libretto for composer Leos Janacek’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen received its premiere in August at the Banff (Alta.) Centre. In February the New York Philharmonic performed the debut of an orchestral work, Laboratory, by 13-year-old George Frankle of Scarsdale, N.Y., during a School Day Concert.

In one of the more glittering events of the year, the Met presented its 125th Anniversary Gala in March. The four-hour performance included appearances by Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, Domingo, Renée Fleming, Dmitry Hvorostovsky, Natalie Dessay, and a host of others in selections from 23 operas, some featuring re-creations of sets and costumes from fabled productions of the company’s past.

The 50th anniversary of New York City’s Lincoln Center was celebrated in May with a performance in the centre’s recently renovated Alice Tully Hall. The New York Philharmonic re-created conductor Leonard Bernstein’s performance of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which Bernstein had led at the centre’s groundbreaking in 1959.

In May the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Stanley Drucker, went onstage at the last moment to fill in for a missing first clarinetist in a performance of Dmitry Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Drucker, 80, who was not scheduled to play that night and who had not performed the piece since the 1950s, reportedly did not drop a note. It was a delightful and unexpected coda to a career that ended with his retirement in 2009 after 60 years with the orchestra.

The classical world was saddened during the year by the passing of several of its most beloved performers, including sopranos Hildegarde Behrens of Germany and Elisabeth Söderström of Sweden and conductor Erich Kunzel, Jr., who helmed the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra for more than 30 years. Other losses included those of soprano Lois Hunt, one of the champions of the American musical theatre, who passed away on July 26 at age 84 in New York City, and classical music critic, author, educator, and program annotator Michael Steinberg, who left a lasting legacy when he died, July 26, near Minneapolis, Minn., at age 80.

Jazz

According to the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts released in June by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the audience for live jazz events slipped to 7.8% of American adults in 2008, reversing a two-decade growth trend. Moreover, the median age of jazz listeners rose to 46, and the number of young jazz musicians declined.

The NEA’s survey inflamed disputes in the jazz community. Was it accurate? Did it over- or underestimate the size of the jazz audience? Most of all, what did it mean for the future of jazz? Even though classical audiences were older than jazz audiences and had experienced a comparable decline in their total numbers, the jazz community was especially sensitive to public perceptions of the art form. Jazz, a fundamentally African American music, was a comparatively young art without the weight of centuries of tradition; it had been generally accepted as a legitimate art form only since the mid-20th century. There were few significant jazz institutions with resources equal to those of major-city art museums, symphony orchestras, and opera companies. In a year when the top recording companies had largely abandoned jazz and two of the major living jazz artists, Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins, turned 79, the NEA survey reinforced fear that jazz was a gradually disappearing art.

Moreover, the premier jazz festival in New York City, the historic centre of jazz, vanished. The JVC Jazz Festival, to have been held in June, was canceled by its producer, Festival Network, which had bought it in 2007 from founder George Wein. Earlier in 2009, Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, had rescued that and the Newport Folk Festival for 2009 after Rhode Island had canceled Festival Network’s license to operate those two events. After the JVC festival debacle, Wein agreed to come out of retirement and produce New York City’s 2010 jazz festival, with a new name and new corporate sponsor, the medical technology company CareFusion, which already sponsored festivals in Chicago and in Monterey, Calif. To its readers’ relief, Jazz Times magazine did not disappear. The 39-year-old monthly did suspend activity in June, but a new owner resumed publication with the old editorial staff in July.

In contrast to the bad news was the activity of the dynamic Wynton Marsalis, who since the mid-1980s had fostered appreciation of jazz as a fine art. On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, January 19, one day before the inauguration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, Marsalis led his Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) Orchestra in an all-star “Let Freedom Swing” concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. On his album released in March, the trumpeter-composer alternated music by his quintet with the recitation of his original poem “He and She,” which was also the title of the album. Marsalis spoke before a U.S. House of Representatives appropriations committee to urge increased funding for the NEA. In June, in the East Room of the White House, 150 young jazz students received music lessons from Wynton, his father, Ellis (piano), his brothers Branford (saxophone), Delfeayo (trombone), and Jason (drums) Marsalis, and members of the JALC Orchestra. First lady Michelle Obama, hostess of the event, told the crowd that “there’s probably no better example of democracy than a jazz ensemble.”

The Living Theatre, which had ignited controversy in 1959 with its jazz- and drug-themed Off-Broadway production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, revived the play for its 50th anniversary. This time saxophonist Renè McLean led the onstage band; his father, Jackie McLean, was the saxophonist during the play’s original run. A highlight of the Chicago Jazz Festival was the triumphant lyric duets by clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and pianist Johnny O’Neal. New York City’s Vision Festival, the leading free-jazz festival in the U.S., featured a tribute to veteran saxophonist Marshall Allen, leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra since Ra’s death in 1993.

Notable new releases included singer Madeleine Peyroux’s Bare Bones, for which she composed or cocomposed all the songs, and piano-bass-drums trio the Bad Plus’s For All I Care, with interpretations of music by Wilco, Nirvana, the Bee Gees, György Ligeti, Milton Babbitt, and Igor Stravinsky. Younger brass improvisers, including cornetist Josh Berman (Old Idea), trumpeter Darren Johnston (The Edge of the Forest), and trumpeter Peter Evans (Nature/Culture), also released impressive albums. Pianist Satoko Fujii continued to perform in Japan and the U.S., issuing Sanrei with her Orchestra Nagoya, Summer Suite with her Orchestra New York, Chun, duets with her trumpeter-husband, Natsuki Tamura, and Under the Water, duets with fellow pianist Myra Melford. Charles Tyler’s Saga of the Outlaws, Bobby Bradford’s With John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Lester Bowie’s All the Numbers, and an eight-CD boxed set of Anthony Braxton’s Complete Arista Recordings (1974–80) led the year’s parade of reissues. Among other releases by the prolific Braxton were Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007 with the Italian Instabile Orchestra, Creative Orchestra (Guelph) 2007 with the AIMToronto Orchestra, and Quartet (Moscow) 2008.

An airplane crash took the lives of saxophonist Gerry Niewood and guitarist Coleman Mellett, of the Chuck Mangione band, as they were flying to a concert in Buffalo. The year’s other deaths included those of drummer Rashied Ali, singers Chris Connor and Blossom Dearie, composer George Russell, saxophone partners Hank Crawford and David Newman, drummer Louie Bellson, saxophonists Bud Shank and Charlie Mariano, and percussionist Manny Oquendo.

Popular

International

The year 2009 was dominated by music from unexpected areas. In the United Kingdom unknown Scottish vocalist Susan Boyle exploded onto the global stage with breathtaking performances on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. A video clip of her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables made her a YouTube sensation and led to one of year’s top-selling albums. Achieving celebrity on the other side of the globe was Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, a blind Aboriginal singer-songwriter from Australia’s Arnhem Land. He accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and sang in the Gumatj dialect for his debut effort, simply titled Gurrumul (2008). It was recorded for an independent label in Darwin, Australia, but became a surprise success across the country and then in Britain, where it topped the World Music album charts. Gurrumul’s songs attracted an international audience, thanks to his thoughtful and soulful vocals and melodies that echoed Western gospel and folk themes. Australian music was also buoyed by the Black Arm Band, a collective of Aboriginal and white performers whose multimedia revue highlighted the “two worlds of Australia” with stories of Aboriginal suffering and survival matched against music that included rock, reggae, and the Aboriginal didgeridoo.

From Africa there were also unexpected newcomers who moved from poverty and obscurity to playing in major concert halls. Staff Benda Bilili, a group of paraplegic polio victims and abandoned children who lived on the grounds surrounding the zoo in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, survived by performing on the streets. They came to the attention of Western musicians who were appearing in Kinshasa and rightly won praise for their debut album, Très très fort, which matched rumba Congolese influences and funk with some extraordinary solos by Roger Landu on an instrument that he called the satonge, which he constructed from a tin can, a piece of wood, and one guitar string.

Elsewhere in Africa, Mali’s Bassekou Kouyate, the virtuoso exponent of the ancient West African lute, the ngoni, released I Speak Fula, a further demonstration of his rapid-fire improvised playing that featured veteran singer Kasse Mady Diabate and kora star Toumani Diabaté. From across the border in Senegal, there was a further display of African innovation with the first studio album in eight years by Baaba Maal, in which he was joined by New York-based electro-dance exponents the Brazilian Girls. Maal was the first artist signed by Palm Pictures, a label run by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, and he made a dramatic appearance at the London festival celebrating Island’s 50th anniversary. Maal was joined onstage by U2 for a memorable set of songs that included “One Love” written by reggae legend and Blackwell discovery Bob Marley.

Senegalese pop star Baaba Maal sings at the Mandela Day concert at Radio City Music Hall in New …

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

From Latin America there were further reminders that world music artists were becoming increasingly keen to collaborate and experiment. RadioKijada, a band that set out to create “new sounds from black Peru,” was a collaboration between Peruvian composer and percussionist Rodolfo Muñoz and Christoph H. Muller, the Swiss electronica artist who reimagined tango with the best-selling Gotan Project. On the album Nuevos sonidos afro peruanos, their aim was to transform Afro-Peruvian styles, making use of rhythm instruments invented by African slaves whose drums had been banned.

The growing success of global fusion styles was also demonstrated by American producer Mark Johnson with his Playing for Change album, Songs Around the World. Johnson traveled around the world, recording both street musicians and celebrities playing soul standards and then mixed the results together. The resulting album was a Top 10 hit in the U.S., and videos of individual recordings generated more than 15 million hits on YouTube.

Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., whose dance-floor-friendly world beats had been club favourites for years, scored a surprising crossover hit with the single “Paper Planes.” It earned her a Grammy Award nomination for record of the year and featured prominently on the sound track of Danny Boyle’s hit film Slumdog Millionaire.

One of the tragedies of the year was the death of Tlahoun Gessesse at age 68. Gessesse, Ethiopia’s best-loved singer, first came to fame in the era of Emperor Haile Selassie singing with the Imperial Bodyguard Band. British guitarist Davy Graham—the composer of the ’60s folk standard “Anji” and a musician who mixed British traditional themes with blues, jazz, or Indian and Arabic influences—died in December 2008.

Jackson died of drug-induced cardiac arrest on June 25, and American television networks devoted hundreds of hours to remembering and celebrating his legacy. In the two and a half weeks following his death, consumers purchased 2.3 million Jackson albums, guaranteeing that the late “King of Pop” would be one of the year’s biggest-selling artists.

Swift’s album Fearless (2008), named best album at the Academy of Country Music Awards in April 2009, overtook Jackson’s Number Ones as the year’s best-selling album, with Jackson pushed into third place by the debut album of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. Swift saw her song “Love Story” top charts internationally, and she sold out Madison Square Garden in one minute. She also became the object of much public sympathy in September when rapper Kanye West grabbed the microphone from her at the MTV Video Music Awards as she was attempting to accept an award for Best Female Video. “But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,” West protested in front a largely confused industry audience that soon stood and cheered for Swift. She capped the year with an impressive showing at the Country Music Association (CMA) awards in November, sweeping all four categories in which she was nominated and becoming the CMA’s youngest-ever entertainer of the year.

Sales of physical CDs, digital CDs, and what Nielsen SoundScan termed “track-equivalent albums” (10 tracks sold from a particular album equaled one album sale) in the first half of 2009 declined 8.9% from the first half of 2008, and digital sales slowed from a 30% increase in growth in 2008 to a 13% increase in 2009. Despite some aberrations—a sales spike in the wake of Jackson’s death and better-than-expected sales of remastered Beatles albums—the pop-music market was in free fall for much of the year.

In January Bruce Springsteen performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., singing through the winter chill at the kick-off concert in honour of the inauguration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Springsteen called 89-year-old folk singer Pete Seeger, a former communist who had been demonized by conservatives in the 1950s, to the stage with him to lead an emotional rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” In August rock historians marked the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. (SeeSpecial Report.)

Former Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant and bluegrass thrush Alison Krauss seemed an unlikely pairing on paper, but the duo’s Raising Sand (2007), helmed by all-star producer T Bone Burnett, won album of the year honours at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards on February 8. Plant and Krauss were the night’s biggest winners, also notching four other Grammy trophies. Lil Wayne, who planned a late-2009 release for his Rebirth album, won four awards, including best rap album. Backstage, Plant talked about his pleasure in being associated with the Americana genre after so many years of being labeled a rock and roller. “It’s great to be considered to be part of the movement that is healthy and has some discrimination,” Plant said. Later in 2009 Americana was given its own Grammy Awards category.

New members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included Metallica, Run-DMC, Jeff Beck, Bobby Womack, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Spooner Oldham, D.J. Fontana, and Bill Black. Rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson was inducted in the Early Influence category.

In country music Darius Rucker ended 2008 as the first African American solo artist to have scored a number one country single since Charley Pride in 1983. In November Rucker was named best new artist at the CMA awards, becoming the first African American performer to win in a major individual category since 1972.